Adolescent Friendship Lessons That Still Ring True...

I never received my letter from Hogwarts.  Nor did I ever receive a letter from Beauxbatons, Ilvermorny or even Durmstrang.  I never learned to swish and flick.  I never had someone tell me if it was leviOOOsa or levioSAA.  My only wand is made from wooden skewers, hot glue and paint. 

Outside of being a great cat toy - it doesn't have much purpose.

Much like I know that I should have been born into an Italian family, I also know that I should have lived in a world that was the making of J.K Rowling.  And while this means that I also lived in world without worry of "You Know Who's" next move, I still had my fair share of darkness.  Like our dear Harry, that darkness is something that I have been working to overcome for years.

I mentioned before that I fed on drama in my younger days because I thought it was normal.  It was a self-destructive way of living.  All my best friends were my worst enemies - something that I practiced well into my 30s.  "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."  A prescription for not getting hurt.  Wrong.

I changed schools right about the time that typical girl drama starts in life.  The old school was relatively small - my class was only about 12 kids.  The new school, a mere two miles away, was bigger comparably.  My class had about 60 kids and I only knew one of them (who I will call Allison).  

Allison and I met when we were 3 years old in preschool.  Her father had just passed away and she was very shy.  Her grandmother lived behind me and because of the trauma she had just endured, she was pretty closed off to most everyone she encountered except for my family. We played together whenever she was with her grandmother and we were super excited to finally be in the same school. 

I walked into my new school on that first day thinking I was the shit.  There was only one girl in my old class who I would consider less than a friend and I was working really hard at not letting her get to me.  In this new school, I was already very good friends with one person so I just knew the rest would fall right into place.  

That's the brain of a 10-year-old for you.  

I was different, awkward, not remotely rich and anything but popular.  The most popular girl in class (and her perfect bangs) wanted nothing to do with me unless it involved ridicule.  Allison was still my friend.  But she also had her own dreams of popularity.  I felt that if I brought her "credit rating" down, she would distance herself from me.  But if there was no one else to hang out with on Saturday night while her mom was out, then I got an invite. 

I can trace my earliest days of depression and anxiety back to this one life experience – changing schools in the 4th grade.  All I wanted was friends.  Any friends.  In a Hogwarts world - I would have accepted a friendship from Malfoy if it meant feeling like a part of something at recess.  (However, because Luna exists in that same world, I know it likely wouldn't have come to that.  And that is okay - I like Luna.)  

In a thirst for friends - any friends at all - I found myself friends with the only other girl in our grade who was less popular than I was.  Her name (for this purpose anyway) is Jenni.

Jenni's parents divorced shortly after she was born and her father moved across the country, got a new family and became pious and super religious.  This was the 80s.  While this sort of arrangement was increasing in popularity, a single mom due to divorce was still a pretty "risqué" situation that was looked down on.  It was lower on the scale of disgrace than someone who came from another neighborhood.  And it was way lower on that same scale than a single mom whose husband died at a young age.  

Jenni's father's involvement in the lives of his children from his first marriage was minimal at best.  They spent a month every summer with him.  He lived 1,000 miles away, so it was a bit of a commute.  He once fell so far behind on tuition payments that his daughters had to sit in the principal’s office, unable to participate in class until he paid up.  None of this helped her reputation.

I wanted nothing more than to fit in so I tried to fake it as much as I could.  I couldn't afford Gucci, so I wore Gitano (sold at Venture - RIP).  I couldn't work a curling iron to get the big bang look everyone else was going for, so I said that my mom was allergic to hairspray - this even though my high school aged, older sister could rock the Farrah Fawcett like no one else.  I was a follower who followed as best as I could, but I wasn’t very good at it.  I did like New Kids on the Block before anyone else though.

While I wanted to be a part of everything in hopes that others would like me, Jenni did absolutely everything she could to not be a part of the crowd.  On the surface, she really didn't care what anyone thought of her.  Both the odd girls out, we became fast friends.  

Jenni was a classic example of the bullied being a bully and I was one of her favorite targets.  Bullying in the 80s wasn't like it is now.  The actions were the same, but no one called it bullying.  We just called it normal life.  Jenni and I would get along on Monday and on Tuesday she would be ridiculing me.  But I didn't have a lot of friends so I would stick it out.  The more that she treated me like a crap friend, the more I craved her approval because she was all that I felt that I had.  Every week was a different "friendship adventure" with her.  

At one point, our twosome became a threesome.  Lily joined us for a couple of years.  At first Lily and I were tightest of tight. But over time, Jenni, who was jealous of our connection, found a way to push me out of the group. Jenni would call me on the phone and ask me how I felt about something mean Lily had done - not telling me that Lily was on the line the whole time.  This was the way espionage happened in the 80s. 

I remember clearly them tormenting me on the playground about something super trivial that could be mocked.  They were in my face together at the same time.   I did exactly as my mom instructed and I pushed past them yelling "Leave. Me. Alone!"  It worked great - they followed me around for months yelling that at me when I walked past.  

A few weeks later, they would apologize, and we would be best of buds again.  A month after that, it would start all over. This cycle played itself out repeatedly from 4th through 12th grades.  And after the invention of Facebook - again briefly in my 30s.  

We would eat lunch together, hang at the same sleepover, attend the same club meetings, work on class projects together like things were totally normal.  But the second she started to see me experiencing emotional stress, she would exploit it.  When she noticed tension between me and the boy I was dating, she would openly flirt and say things like "hey, call me tonight just because she doesn't want you to" - right in front of me.  She even signed my yearbook with some antidote about how much fun it was to hate me and make me feel bad.  

She signed my Junior year yearbook saying "...to the person I love to hate and get riled up."  My daughter found this in my yearbook when she was in hear tweens and asked me why I would let someone so obviously mean sign my yearbook.  I couldn't answer her.  

As an adult, I can look at the situation and realize that Jenni had her own issues that she refused to deal with - most that tied back to her relationship with her father and the fact that she felt that she didn't fit in.  She had serious attention seeking issues.  Last I heard, she still hadn't addressed them.  She was in a marriage of convenience and carrying on several relationships with married men on Ashley Madison while telling anyone who would listen about her PTSD and fear of being alone with men stemming from a sexual assault while she was in the military.   

Jenni is the first person in my life (who wasn't a natural sibling rivalry) who I had such a clear, unhealthy relationship with.  As time went on, I had several romantic relationships and at least one work related situation that were full of similar drama.  I suppose the Brenda/Kelly/Dylan/90210 plot didn't really help me to realize that a normal life didn't have to involve drama.  It was like I felt that the only normal way to happiness was through pain.  It took me several different "Jenni" experiences before I was able to sort this all out in a way that made sense to me.

  

Why did I crave the approval of this person who for the better part of nine years treated me like crap?  Why did I insist on allowing this drama in my life?  Why do we feel the need to keep our friends close and enemies closer?  Why do we often think that we just aren't worthy of healthy relationships?  

As humans, we crave acceptance of the masses.  We don't want people to hate us.  We don't want to feel shame.  We want to feel love and acceptance.  We want to feel worthy.  We believe that everyone is a good person down in their heart that will one day just stop being so hateful.

It is so easy to stand on the outside of a situation and clearly say that it is unhealthy and wrong.  Yet when it comes to ourselves, we are unable to be as objective.  It is often impossible to take our own advice.  But why?

Negative and unhealthy relationships are both totally normal and totally abnormal.  Everyone - from the popular girl with the perfect bangs to Draco Malfoy - has had this experience.  (Malfoy's tormentor didn't advance the plot and I still don’t know who tormented the girl with the perfect bangs - but I have to believe it happened.)  No matter how much time and distance we put between that person and our self, it still has a way of eating away at our self-confidence when we least expect it.

In a perfect world, we could and should get through our entire lives without ever falling under the influence of even one toxic friendship or relationship.  And while we should not keep these people in our lives, bringing down our emotional well-being, we do need to have these experiences if we want to have healthy relationships in our future because they teach us two very valuable lessons.  

The first is how to recognize those people in our lives who are worthy of our time, love and energy.  The second is how not to be the person in someone else's life who is not worthy of their time, love and energy.  

I consider myself lucky that I was able to learn these lessons while I still had time to use them.  I’m also lucky that Jenni didn't know how to use the Petrificus Totalus curse.

Happy Galentine's Day to the Gal friends that are worth your time and energy and help make you the best you that you can be.